The present invention relates to electronic musical instrument systems having a plurality of musical instruments interconnected via a communication network.
Electronic musical instruments are conventionally known which can form data on various tone colors (tone-color-related data) by editing various parameters and store the thus-formed data in a floppy disk or other suitable secondary storage device for preservation and transportation of the data. Each of the electronic musical instruments is designed to also allow an exchange of the tone-color-related data with another electronic musical instrument by means of the floppy disk or other secondary storage device storing the tone-color-related data. To exchange the tone-color-related data, the floppy disk, for example, is inserted in the other electronic musical instrument, which is then brought into a predetermined read mode for reading the tone-color-related parameters and other data from the floppy disk. But, to achieve this, the same tone generation system must be employed in the electronic musical instruments which attempt to exchange the data. Today, such a data exchange is sometimes done by interconnecting plural electronic musical instruments via the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface).
However, the prior technique as mentioned above is not satisfactory in that, in order to utilize tone-color-related data or other data formed by another electronic musical instrument, it is absolutely necessary to exchange the data via some secondary storage medium. In addition, considerable amount of human intervention is necessary for the data exchange operation, which therefore tends to be a very complex and time-consuming operation. Further, there is encountered another problem that the operator must always recognize the contents of the data stored in the individual electronic musical instruments; e.g. the operator must know in which of the musical instruments the data to be exchanged is stored.
Such a problem may be avoided by redundantly storing the same data in all the electronic musical instruments, but this approach is not preferable in that the storage areas of the musical instruments are greatly wasted. The same problem will arise even if the data exchange is performed via the MIDI in place of the secondary storage device.